Pete Boggs


So today I'm playing the guitar and I remember Bob Dylan's lyric, "... to live outside the law you must be honest." It reconnected me to what I was pondering as I drove across the Mohave Desert. It is the bait I can use to fish for the rest of the elements in the picture, such as a mutilated body in a bog, a Navajo rug, voodoo, green tea and sexual taboo. The Dylan lyric is the bait on the hook and forgotten connections are the fish hidden beneath the surface.

But instead of fishing in the ocean I'll narrow it down to a particular environment and a particular fish, like trout fishing in a stream, with Pete Boggs. Down underneath the surface of Pete Boggs is a blues legend married to Swampy Marshland, and she has a history and a disposition and the deeper down beneath the surface you go the more things move into associative patterns. This is the source of subtle thinking, as opposed to literal, or fundamentalist, thinking.

This is where the Navajo rug comes in. It is the result of subtle mind, which is why Gurdjieff used to have his students learn to weave. This kind of thinking is in associative patterns and is described as taking a musical scale: do rey mi fa so la ti do, and between do and rey, putting a subscale. The pattern descends into increasing subtlety, as in the green tea ceremony. This thinking searches for quality, or beauty, as opposed to truth, in which everything not the answer is eliminated and you are left with "the point."

Some might find subtle thought tedious and pointless, and they have a point.

The reason my mind went to Pete Boggs was as a reminder of something I was watching on NOVA, about these people who were killed with extreme prejudice and staked down in the peat boggs, where they were preserved. So the people who were fishing for truth speculated on why they were not just murdered, but staked out in a bog. One of the suggestions was that they were perverts, which is to say, people who did not respect the taboos. They were being trapped in purgatory, deprived of an afterlife, for crossing social taboos. We're not talking Polynesia here. It's the early English. Apparently even in the Iron Age you had to escape to Paris for offending the status quo.

This suggests that even looking at taboos is dangerous territory, because by their nature, they are enforced through the only law that really matters, that of being turned out of the group. This was the only law the Navajo had, or needed, because they had things stripped down to the basics, as they traveled light. If you did something bad enough, you could be ostracized. Other than that, welcome to the family. Among voodoo cultures the witch doctor puts a spell on you and you die. But the reason you die is that people start to look through you -- knowing about the spell and your inevitable death -- and you buy into the spell. Sometimes there's no way out, like in "Master and Commander," when the young officer took on the projections of the crew as being the cause of misfortune, and had to sacrifice himself to the sea to remove the curse.

Once you are turned out of the group you're pretty much fucked, because you have no rights. So don't even look behind that curtain. No good can come of it.

The power of taboo is stronger than pretty much anything else I know of, and it rests on the fear of being not loved. That is the mirrored opposite of the threat to abandon. People who are not very lovable usually have a great fear of being rejected. This is played for entertainment value on television as public taste sinks to unplumbed depths on "reality" television.

Beneath the taboo there is the fear of being ripped apart, like one of the men in the bog was ripped apart. They can't find some of him. It is said that this is by far the worst of all fears, much worse than the fear of death.

What did Pete Boggs do to be torn apart? It reminds me of the parrot who is put in the freezer for vulgar language, and when he finally gets out he cocks his head at a frozen chicken and asks, "What did he say?"

The important thing to know about taboo is that it requires unconsciousness. So the taboo line is feared but the reason it is feared is not conscious. It is very easy to confuse the other side of the taboo with an "evil other," who is feared and hated. "I've left it to you. You'll have to decide. Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?"

That is why to live outside the law you have to be honest. Just for crossing the taboos by not being afraid of them, you are taking the first step in the hero's journey outlined by Joseph Campbell in, "Hero With A Thousand Faces." You are moving past the guardians at the gate, and from then on, you're on your own. You are on the trail of Odysseus, and if the sirens don't get you the island woman will turn you into a pig.

Nobody who is inside the gates can help you, because the only way they stay inside there is to buy protection from what you have already crossed into. They are kept out of it by being told of all the awful things that can happen to you, like being consumed by fire, and it's all true. But it also has an element of Jim Carey in "The Truman Show," where he's in a travel agency and all the posters show hazards and death, with banners like, "It could happen to you." Everything has risk.

So this is a description of what I wrote about yesterday, of processing information while I drive. I couldn't remember a thing I thought about yesterday, and today, recalling that one line from Bob Dylan about having to be honest to live outside the law, different parts of the puzzle come back, and I can see how they fit together. And at the same time there are so many of them that it would take a book to background each one and put them together.

I'm seeing a history from Woody Guthrie and Jack Black and Bob Dylan and William Burroughs, from these guys who were trying to be honest enough to live outside the law. They understood that a man is either a "Johnson" or he isn't, and if he's not no amount of law is going to change it.

Law in the wrong hands is just another weapon of brutality and social control. But ethical behavior is more powerful than law, because it rests on a simple premise. "What I'm expecting from other people, am I expecting it from me, first?"

Pete Boggs may be staked down where his body won't decay, caught forever between heaven and earth, but the hard part of purgatory must be the terror of being trapped and never making it to heaven. But after awhile abject terror must get boring, and even the most surrendered must want to look around and make an objective assessment of the situation. Given the limitations of being caught in purgatory, there is only one conclusion, in the end, of how to make lemonade from this lemon.

The middle ground is the only place from where you can have access in either direction, that is to say, consciousness in both the left and right side.

Enough of that ... tonight, I think I'm gonna go down town.

Posted: Fri - January 19, 2007 at 11:54 AM